Last weekend’s Kennards Hire Rally Australia saw a number of WA competitors make the 4,500km pilgrimage to Coffs Harbour to compete in the Australian round of the WRC.
Dylan King finished 10th in the ARC component at Rally Australia. (Photo: Peter Whitten)
One of the teams from WA was the Lee’s Transport / Dylan King Motorsport team headed by Dylan King and co-driver Daymon Nicoli. The team have just returned from finishing 10th place overall in the ARC, which was an amazing result given the limited preparation and logistical challenges en-countered.
“We are really happy with our overall position, obviously would have loved a podium finish but con-sidering it was my first event outside of WA, I am stoked. It was an amazing feeling just to finish the event and I owe it to Daymon and our amazing service team headed by Josh Pearce and Rob Web-ber,” said King.
The event posed a number of challenges for King & Nicoli who only had the one day of testing to accustom themselves to the varying and very different road conditions from what they have experi-enced in the WARC series.
“The road conditions were really tough and taxing on the tyres and car. We made a poor tyre choice on day 1 electing to go for a medium compound. Consequently they were virtually destroyed after the second stage,” said King.
King’s times were competitive throughout day one and he was staying in touch with the likes of Ev-ans, Bates and Taylor however, on SS6 car troubles struck and King lost valuable time.
“Unfortunately at the end of SS6 we lost the centre diff which cost us a lot of time. Fortunately the guys were able to resolve the problem at service,” said Nicoli.
As expected the guys ran over time fixing the issue which resulted in a 4 minute penalty. Not de-terred by their current standing and the unlikelihood of a podium finish, they were ready to attack day 2.
Day 2 and the team faced the infamous 50km Nambucca stage. Luck wasn’t on their side as part way through the stage they experienced turbo problems and were well down on power. They were able to rectify the issue by the next stage and once again were competitive throughout the day. Unfortu-nately, tragedy struck on the last SSS stage of the day with gearbox issues.
“We broke the output shaft on the gearbox just off the start line so had to push the car out resulting in a derived time of 7 minutes putting us behind again,” said King.
Again, the team managed to replace the output shaft during the 45 minute service,
allowing them to get back out for the final day of competition.
“Given a podium was out of the picture the main aim for Sunday was to finish the event,” said Nicoli.
The team pulled into Coffs Harbour at the end of the last stage a little more battered and bruised in 10th position.
“It was an overwhelming feeling to finish the event given what we went through to get here. It was such an amazing experience and I learnt so much. I couldn’t be happier with the season I have had, first winning the WA championship with Abbey and then competing in my first WRC event - two goals accomplished in one season! Now that I have had a taste of the east coast I’m going to do my best to make it to a few ARC rounds in 2017,” said King.
- Team Release
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